Genocide has occurred throughout history, from the very beginnings of the social organisation of human communities until the present. But working out what do about it is no easy task.

When Vladimir Putin reviews the troops marking the 70th anniversary of Russia’s victory of Nazism, he won’t have many leaders of democratic nations to accompany him.
EPA/Alexey Druzhinin/ RIA NOVOSTI May 7, 2015

Victory over Nazi Germany is one unambiguously positive accomplishment of the 20th century; and yet, constructing a positive narrative about the Soviet second world war has proven hard – largely because there are some stubborn facts to contend with.

A French field kitchen in use by the French troops within half a mile of the Turkish lines on the southern section of Gallipoli Peninsula, 1915.
Ernest Brooks/FlickrApril 24, 2015

We’ve been burning things for hundreds of thousands of years. Australian Aboriginals practised fire-stick farming to regenerate the soil and drive out animals for hunting. Yet manmade fires not only enable…

Three Australian IS fighters may have been killed in the last month, including Mohammad Ali Baryalei.
AAP Image/YouTubeNovember 23, 2014

Estimates are that there are more than 60 Australian citizens in the ranks of the Islamic State (IS) armies sweeping through Syria and Iraq. In a recent case, reported by the Sydney Morning Herald last…

Each of the 888,246 ceramic poppies in the Tower of London’s moat represent a British or Commonwealth first-world-war casualty.
EPA/Andy RainNovember 10, 2014

Every year on Remembrance Day, we pause to look back on old wars and recount the tallies of the dead, including 16 million killed in the first world war and 60 million in the second world war. And every…

The Ripper case is important, and not only because of the women who suffered dreadful deaths.
Dalibor LevíčekNovember 3, 2014

The Jack the Ripper murders are the most potent cold case ever. More than a century on from the first killing in 1888 they are still attracting global attention. Academics of many disciplines publish on…

Today horses are still whipped in public, but only in the name of sport.
AAP Image/Julian SmithOctober 28, 2014

It’s not just the horses that wear blinkers during the Melbourne Cup, the so-called “race that stops a nation”, which takes place next Tuesday. Perhaps it’s the excitement, the champagne or the extraordinary…

The breastplate given to ‘U. Robert King of the Big River and Big Leather Tribes’ by an unknown settler at Goonal station.
Photo Dragi Markovic, National Museum of AustraliaOctober 27, 2014

The flood of coverage of the centenary of Gallipoli and the first world war profoundly shapes the way we think of Australia’s history; but we suppress other violent events in our own country that also…

Originally, to be honourable meant very different things for men and for women.
SimonOctober 5, 2014

Ideas about personal honour are a major key to understanding violence. This is so today, when “honour” is often replaced by terms such as respect - with “dissing” as its opposite. It was even more true…

Incendiaries of varying complexity have been used in warfare since ancient times.
Yann CaradecSeptember 25, 2014

The petrol bomb – or “Molotov cocktail” – is an iconic symbol of 20th-century political violence. Simple, cheap and effective, it has become a staple feature of protest, riot and rebellion; a weapon of…

A number of studies link the abuse of animals in childhood with human abuse later in life.
elizabeth tersigniSeptember 22, 2014

When we talk about violence, there is an implicit assumption that we mean human-to-human violence. Yet behind the veneer of our civilised society, economy and culture is a massive edifice of violence of…

Over the coming months, we’ll be running pieces looking at the history and nature of violence. Here Philip Dwyer explains why. Violence – to state the obvious – isn’t new. But interest in the history of…